Michael Winter Quotes

The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence will pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?

In the aftermath of any war or genocide, healing and reconciliation are ultimate aspirations.

Winning the peace is harder than winning the war.

The concept of military readiness is well understood, but readiness for what happens after the fighting stops is just as important.

A war is only as good as the peace that follows.

A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

When the spring comes, we will manure the plains of Kosova with the bones of Serbs, for we Albanians have suffered too much to forget

I tried to go to Kosovo to establish a statue to commemorate those who died during the wars, and to discuss moving on, so we could move into a new era. But I was banned from there.

After every war someone has to tidy up.

It is obvious that taking the country from a state of war to being a lawful state won't be easy.

Those of us who actually were working in the region at the time will point out how strongly committed we were to supporting the democratic process and encouraging elections, in spite of the fact that a war was going on in several of these countries.

I was part of a government that tried to resolve the question of Kosovo by war. Perhaps there is some justice that today I should be the person most responsible for finding a peaceful solution.

In Turkey, we have lived almost everything that could be lived; war and torture... The war concept was consumed to its limits. But there is only one way we have not tried: negotiations, peace, and talking.

One can go to war alone, but you can't build peace alone.

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

It's not just the war itself. It's what you do after the war and what structure you put in place and how you make that structure work.

We should wage war not to win war, but to win peace.

In some ways, Israel has achieved a peace. There are fewer rockets being sent into Sderot, there are no rockets to speak of from the North, there has been very little terrorism from the West Bank. It's a kind of peace. I hope for a better and more enduring peace. Peace is not an endgame; we will never be completely at peace.

Rather than turning away from the staggering scale and depth of misery caused by war, we must strive to develop our capacity to empathize and feel the sufferings of others.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

But the memory of war weighs undiminished upon the people's minds. That is because deeper than material wounds, moral wounds are smarting, inflicted by the so- called peace treaties.

Men and women who know the brutal reality of war, who know that war strips people of their very humanity, must unite in a new global partnership for peace.

I am not sure that you, the younger generations, will like to go to war that we went through. So, we learn as the mistakes are being committed.

Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.

We in the West think of peace as society's default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms and resume their normal lives.